Something's Cooking Under West Virginia's Surface

West Virginia is synonymous with coal mining, but a new study suggests the Mountain State is also a prime location for geothermal energy production.

A subsurface map produced by Southern Methodist University with funding from the philanthropic arm of search engine giant Google, found a large swath of geothermal hot spots in the eastern portion of the state that could be tapped to produce energy for Atlantic Seaboard communities.

At depths ranging from three to eight kilometers, temperatures in rock formations were found hovering in the 200 degrees Celsius range. That's similar to the amount of heat produced by well-documented geothermal fields in places like Reykjavik, Iceland and The Geysers in Northern California, where substantial energy projects are already underway.

Hopefully, the funding push will encourage the private sector and West Virginia to consider turning away from the environmentally destructive coal energy cycle and start developing a cleaner, more sustainable energy future. After all, 320,000 Icelanders can't be wrong.

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